COL Inquiry #6: Academic/professional reading and hypothesis

Find 3 Pieces of academic/professional reading. Explain how they and other sources helped you form hypotheses about aspects of teaching that might contribute to current patterns of learning.

Reading ONE: The Reading apprenticeship
The  Reading Practice Intensive (R.P.I) is a programme that was being run in terms 2 and 3 for those staff who were interested in the support to meet the demands and changes to new policy mandates, which they had built into the Year 7-10 RPI design.  The aims of the programme were to:
Building readiness for the reading and writing co-requisite unit standards and the common literacy assessment activities; dText set approaches to teaching reading strategies, skills and dispositions to support deep learning and ākonga literacy improvement;
A shared ‘pillars of reading’ framework that can be used to scale practices across teams and departments, in line with cross curricula (Te Mātaiaho), cross-subject and Common Practice Model approaches;
Draws on research based practices from Reading Apprenticeship in the secondary subject disciples and Secondary Literacy: A Teacher Handbook.
I clicked on Reading Apprenticeship and watched a video showing a Science teacher teaching and reading aloud supporting the students with a text.

Teacher modelling to the class:
I noticed that this is exactly what I do with my students but I see we could spend more time asking the questions.  One of the techniques was breaking down the title of the article.  The teacher models breaking down the title then asks the questions and writes it around the article.   Then she asked the students if there was anything they missed and to add to it.
Individual tasks:
Student then practiced on their own the same technique.
Group:  Then students got into groups and discussed the text together.
Class:  Students reported the questions/queries back to teacher as a whole class.  Teacher repeated the question back to the students and a shared understanding of the text was gathered.
The approach looks at 4 key dimensions below:

What Does a Reading Apprenticeship Classroom Look Like?  This I read through this document outlining some basics.  Here are some (mainly Science) curriculum specific units and I liked the History one. 
I found heaps of good accessible resources on this site and I am interested in learning more about rubric’s like this one; Rubric-for-Student-Self-Assessment-of-Collaborative-Work.pdf

Reading TWO:  Nicola Wells CoL Teacher Report 2019 - Discussion Points, Conclusions and Suggestions

In 2019, Nicola Wells who was an across school COL teachers wrote a comprehensive report on her inquiry called 'Accelerated reading comprehension in students arriving at Tamaki College from Manaiakalani cluster Primary schools'.

Some of her key findings that I found interesting were:

Reading mileage - suggestion

To improve reading comprehension I propose that reading mileage - time spent actively reading a wide range of texts for a range of reasons, engaging in repeated reading of the same text, or engaging in supplementary comprehension strategies - should be increased. 

In the Secondary school additional reading mileage could be implemented during one of the single, 50-minute periods for many of the core subjects such as Science, Social Studies, Health and History, as it already is in English. Question generation and comprehension could be tailored to suit reading comprehension in each subject. For example, reading in History and Social Studies would suit the Questioning the Author package/routine while question generation targeting fact recognition and reliability would suit Science. 

Summarisation is supported as a reading comprehension strategy by multiple studies. Sencibaugh (2005) reported that some auditory/language-dependent strategies had a great impact on reading comprehension for students with reading disabilities, including ‘paragraph restatement’ and ‘summarisation.’

Reading THREE: Understanding the Science of Reading in the 'Reading League' (notes here)

How these readings helped me to form a hypothesis.

My hunch at the start of the year was that my learners were struggled to read because they were in the right learning environment and this has distracted them from their learning. Our students arrive at our school well below the national norm and this leads to a lack in engagement and motivation to engage in learning about reading.

From these readings, it is clear that the science of reading and structured literacy is an important approach to achieving success.  A key factor to succeed in Senior Social Sciences is the ability to critically think and comprehensively describe and understand key concepts and unpacking meaning of language is important.  Teacher modelling and reading mileage is another way to improve reading comprehension.

My biggest takeaway being the amount of time I need to spend focusing on modelling the understanding of key words through phonetic sounding out of words, something which I have done in the past, but can work if used in more frequency.  Developing and utilising a simple framework that would deepen their understanding of the text their reading is another area I want to explore further.